Photo Courtesy of CSI Gallery"Wind Woman" by Lynne Allen is featured at the CSI Gallery show.

STATEN ISLAND, NY — Most art outlets will give you an easier assignment this fall than the College of Staten Island Gallery, where “Wording the Image/Imaging the Word” opened recently.

But easy art is cheating. The school is doing exactly what it should: At a college, no area of inquiry should surrender easily, art included.

It’s not that it’s a big show — just four unusually dexterous printmakers with intricate agendas. Guest curated by Kit Smyth Basquin, “Wording the Image/Imaging the Word” has just 25 pieces, made over a 35-year span.

The earliest comes from Pat Steir, the well-established painter whose ongoing “Waterfall” paintings are ubiquitous and welcome today in museum and corporate

The most recent works were made in the past few years by Lynne Allen. Allen and another participant, Jaune Quick-to-see Smith, have Native American blood, which informs their work.

All four participants are art-world veterans — 60-to-70 years of age — and all find an illuminated path in the vintage feminist dictum, “the personal is political.”

In the catalogue essay, gallery director Nanette Salomon and the curator collaboratively assert that the slogan is as relevant today “as when it was introduced in 1969 and popularized through the 1970s.”

They understate it. The idea is so pervasive today, it’s an automatic assumption. WORD MADE FLESH

Allen establishes one of the overriding themes, at the entrance to the gallery with “Invasion,” a grometted hanging made of out of thick quilted pads that moving men use to protect furniture.

A flotilla of small beaded warships (stenciled onto the surface, it turns out), float across the fabric, which is sprinkled with talismans— fishing weights, oxidized bottle caps — and printed with text in English and a Native language.

The text is personal, political, historical, an eyewitness account: “The advance was like the seasons. It came on so gradually that we were not aware of it until it was upon us.”

The piece suggests how the colonization might have entered the Native record in a commemorative artifact.

Two print methods, digital and woodcut, are used in the smaller (17x17 inch) piece “Wind Woman (Ita ta Win).” It’s a dim portrait of Allen’s great grandmother, underscored with faint handwriting and overlaid with bright red markings, like lesions, scattershot or pox.

“Wind Woman,” we’re encouraged to think, endured privations.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, probably the best-known female Native American artist at work today, grew up on a reservation in Montana. Her work combines 20th century American styles of art-making with issues that concern her as an Indian. On top of it all, there’s the printmaking agenda.

One large piece, “What is an American” (2001), has a central, sketchy headless figure. A little red, white and blue blood gusher fountains from one of its hands.

References are distributed throughout like little icons. There’s a bison, a pineapple, the profile on an Indian head nickel, Mickey Mouse ears and a slogan, “Americans have big ideas.”

Elsewhere, Quick-to-See Smith ruminates about heritage, as in “pure-bloods” and “mestizos,” and about appropriation when Indian imagery is co-opted for advertising.

Empty dresses were such pervasive metaphor years ago in feminist art, the idea became threadbare. Still, Lesley Dill combines them with letterpress-printed lines from Emily Dickinson to suggest how poetry can function like armor, like a defense system.

Dill stains her often three-dimensional prints with tea so they look aged or she sews on them, adding lines of poems on thin strips (like the “Hosannas” that stream out of angel’s mouths in some manuscript paintings). They’re austere, not hopechest artsy-craftsy.

Thirty-five years ago Pat Steir, the senior figure in the show, produced a series of small black and white etchings prints (“Burial Mound Series”) as a memorial to a deceased friend. They’re gridded puzzles and word-games inscribed with repeated phrases.

Her big piece in the show — a wide, colorful, three-panel 42-inch piece called “Abstraction, Belief, Desire” — required such successive printing processes (“color aquatint with soft-ground and hard-ground etching, spit-bite aquatint and drypoint”), it’s practically the creation of the world.

There’s a lexicon of shapes in white on red, labeled “Form,” at the far left. In the middle (“Illusion”) the flat shapes are now rounded and dimensional. At the far right (“Myth”), the shapes have become recognizable entities: a young woman, an angel at prayer, etc.

Other ideas are inlaid in this non-schematic illustration/manifesto, accessible to any viewer willing to drum them out.

‘Wording the Image: Imaging the Word’

Four printmakers present 25 pieces made over a 35-year span.

Where

College of Staten Island Gallery, in the Center for the Arts on the campus at 2800 Victory Blvd., Willowbrook.